They don’t see the relevance of their work, except as a means to a paycheck and maybe a promotion.

That’s when information hoarding and office politics set in–culture killers of the highest order.

2. Create fluid, cross-functional teams

There’s this little movement called DevOps you may have heard of that’s all about breaking down organizational silos.

Turns out, the best way to get your HR people and your finance people to collaborate closely is to put them on the same team – if not as neighbors on your org chart, at least as contributors to the same project.

I’m a member of a couple teams at Atlassian, one of which comprises six people from different functional backgrounds who all report to different managers.

We’re all part-time on the project, but we’re active on it daily.

The diversity of skills and thought in the mix means we arrive at better decisions (and faster) than if the project was handed off to each of us in turn.

3. Create a safe space for dissent and unlearning

Contributing fresh or dissenting ideas puts you in an inherently vulnerable position.

See also: partnering with another person to deliver your work.

In order for people to embrace collaboration, they have to believe they won’t regret it.

Diversity and inclusion are absolutely critical aspects of creating a safe space for collaboration.

But you have to think beyond the numbers. Here’s a familiar exchange: “Our staff is 40% women!” … “Are they all clustered in Marketing and HR?” … “Pretty much.

What’s your point?” The point is there has to be diversity at the team level, so everyone interacts with a diverse group of people and builds empathy every day.

Practices matter, too. I’ve seen teams adopt blameless post-mortems (hat-tip to DevOps, once again) in which it’s assumed that whatever happened was a shared failure.

An opportunity for the whole team or department to examine their systems and practices, then make some changes.